enjoy the breeze

Monday, April 13, 2009

i wrote Butterflies and Spiders' Webs at 4:33 AM for you.

Kieran lay on the mats, her blanket over her and her hands running themselves through her tousled hair. It was perhaps midnight, now; but for some reason she could not sleep. Tobias had spent most of the day avoiding her, and she was beginning to wonder if kissing him had been a dreadful mistake. But then, someone like Tobias did not seem capable of understanding the significance of the action. Kieran sighed. Being in love was difficult, and very tiring. Being in love with someone as silent and as clueless as Tobias was double the trouble.

But again, she smiled to herself, it was all worth it. Love was sort of like chasing a butterfly—it was almost always out of reach, always flitting tantalizingly close to her hands, but never quite close enough for her to catch in her cupped palms. It was beautiful as much as it was small and fragile. And yet, in spite of their fragility, butterflies were always around. She saw them everywhere, around the house, in the grassland, in the forest. It was as though the death of one butterfly was always compensated for by the birth of another, and so butterflies were forever in abundance, never absent. Beautiful butterflies, some the color of the sun, some the color of the ocean, and some the color of the night.

Kieran giggled when she thought of how Alexander would react to the metaphor. And then she wondered if Alexander had ever been in love before. Had any of them been in love before? What about Demetrius? Kieran fingered the end of her blanket. She knew Alexander’s story, but no one else’s. Had they had their families, then? Were they in touch? Most likely not, she presumed, but if they had the chance, would they return to the place from which they had come?

It occurred to her that one person can have many connections. He can love many people. There are many kinds of love, after all. That person would be the centre of it all, the centre of the delicate web of loved ones. If, say, he were to die, all the connections would be broken, just like how the silvery strands of silk break apart after the spider’s web has been disturbed.

It was as though she had been thrown headfirst into a tub of icy water. Kieran sat bolt upright.

It was so delicate! It was so easy, so simple to break! All it took was one moment of hesitation, one moment of mistaken judgment, and all the strings in the web, every last one of them, would be torn wide apart. If she died in her impending battle with O’Conner, the strings connected to her existence would fall away; following her death, the rest of the Breakers would die, and the strings connected to each of their existences would also be destroyed. The web that had taken so many years to build, so many times of hardship, so much trust, so much love, so much pain and joy, would cease to be a beautiful, intricate sculpture of a thousand silvery strands; it would become a loose, broken, tangled mass of dull strings that meant nothing, nothing at all. And all it took was one failure, one death! The fate of the web lay in her hands alone!

Kieran shuddered and then bent forward, hugging her knees to her chest. She was not fighting for five people, then. She was fighting for the tens, perhaps for the hundreds of people who knew them and loved them and would cry for them when they died, fighting to keep them from the pain of loss. So much depended on her.

She looked up helplessly, and then caught sight of an unfinished spider’s web constructed just near the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The spider hung from it, constructing the very last few strands that would make the web whole.

The wind blew—a strong, icy wind. In a single, hot, blinded moment, Kieran bolted to the window and slammed it shut.

But when she looked up again, the web had already been blown away. So had the spider.

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PROFILE

this is where i let rip, so be warned that you might not like everything that pops up here. but i do, so deal with it. (: .

loves

this is so subject to change that i'm not even gonna bother listing them down.

hates

too many, and the list would be extremely volatile, anyway.

wants

a place in Oxford University (good luck, jennifer.)
for someone to know that he has a special place in her heart!
to survive in HCJC next year
not to have so many wants (but who's counting?)

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